1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a small electronic card, and, more particularly, to a small electronic card with peripheral contacts.
2. Description of the Related Art
Development in electronic technology has accelerated the growth in the popularity of many types of portable computing products, such as notebooks, palm computers and PDAs; and various types of commercial electronic products, such as digital cameras, digital video players and MP3 players. In general, both portable computing products and commercial electronic products may utilize a small memory card, such as MS memory card 41 shown in FIG. 4, for data storage, and other types of small electronic cards for peripheral functions, such as network cards or modem cards.
A prior art technique provides a small electronic card with a single line of contacts, which generally does not provide a sufficient number of contacts for interfacing purposes.
Please refer to FIG. 1. Another prior art technique provides a small electronic card 11 with double (parallel) lines of contacts 112, which on one hand can satisfy interfacing requirements, but on the other hand causes difficulty to design the reader. As shown in FIG. 2, in order to read the contacts 111 and 112, pins 26 of the reader 25 need to be bent to avoid touching the contact 111 or 112, which would otherwise cause a short circuit. However, the bent pin 26 is easily broken and difficult to manufacture. Alternatively, as shown in FIG. 3, another reader 35 has pins 36 placed on both the upper side and lower side for contacting front and back contacts, but this design increases the reader's height and does not follow the trend of miniaturization.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a small electronic card with peripheral contacts to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.